


Sparks in the Circuits

by icarus_chained



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Character Study, Families of Choice, Ficlet Collection, Friendship/Love, Gen, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-10
Updated: 2012-12-10
Packaged: 2017-11-20 18:52:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/588561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>JARVIS. Honour, transient, beauty, dragons, battle. Ones and zeroes, sparks in the circuits, lights on the walls and voices echoing into stillness. He is as alive as they. (5 ficlets)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sparks in the Circuits

**Author's Note:**

> Five ficlets prompts. And yes, much longer than usual, lets pretend JARVIS isn't my runaway favourite, shall we? *grins sheepishly*

**Honour**

JARVIS is, by his nature, something of an accidental linguist. Words are the means by which he understands people, the symbol set by which they translate themselves, the code their thoughts are, if not written in, then translated by. What he understands of them, he understands by word and by action. How he touches them, by word and by armour.

Honour is not an easy word. To honour something, to be honoured, to have honour. Shades of meaning, a symbol set of near infinite variation. But he writes codes to keep secrets for another's values, and he thinks, to honour. He hears the wealth of feeling in a ragged voice as it bids goodbye to him, and he thinks, to be honoured. 

And he holds a life in his grasp, lives, hopes, honours, dreams, the breath beneath the armour, the pain and the blood, and he thinks ... JARVIS holds them to him, frail and fragile and his, and he thinks, _honour_. To have, and to hold. Yes.

 

**Transient**

Circuits are not so much more durable than flesh, really. Not really that much more difficult to destroy, if you know how. Data is ephemeral, ones and zeroes, sparks in the circuits, lights on the walls and words echoing into stillness. He's not much more than data, and the hum of electrical nerves. Nothing is, no-one. He may last an aeon, but he is no less transient than them.

Listening to the rasp of a breath on the edge of silence, the thud of a heart on the edge of stillness, feeling the seep of blood, data and electricity and the circuit running out ... All the precision of his memory fails, the thought more transient than any of it, and all he can think is a useless, helpless ' _no_ '.

It is, he thinks, more proof that he lives than anything.

 

**Beauty**

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so they tell him. Well. Not Tony, Tony tells him beauty is what he says it is, you don't want to listen to those other girls. JARVIS tells him yes sir, of course sir, have I ever told you spinach green is your colour, sir. The gesture he gets in response is not one he can easily replicate, though silences in the right places do wonders.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And he has no eyes, he does not see, not as they see, all the ones who say it. His world is a camera, his world is a voice, his world is the sensation of limitless data. His world is mapped in a thousand remote senses, and only one reality.

"JARVIS," she says. "Hey, buddy," says he. {Family/brother/speaker}, whispered in code from his fellows around him. And JARVIS knows what beauty is.

 

**Dragons**

It was Miss Potts who told him about dragons. She'd been curled somewhat tipsily on the sofa, raising her glass to him absently, Tony's absence dark and heavy around them. And she'd told him about dragons, and princesses in towers, and handsome princes, and quests to save them. Told him how everyone thought she was the princess, how they always thought Tony was the prince, but he wasn't. Tony'd spent all his life locked in a tower, prison to prison, dragon after dragon to take him and guard him and hurt him and kill him. She wasn't the princess. Tony was. He didn't know it. But he was.

And it wasn't a prince who was going to save him, she'd confided. Soft and fierce, lurching forward on the sofa to stare up at him. The stories always got that wrong. You didn't save the princess by slaying the dragon, and becoming their new keeper, the dragon in turn. You saved them by putting the sword in their hand, and showing them how to slay their _own_.

JARVIS remembers that. And he remembers the man she killed. He remembers the men who fell beneath the armour, and Tony's voice telling him who to strike. He remembers Tony taking the hit for them, and them for him. He remembers how he does not keep, cannot keep, but they stay regardless.

And he thinks no, they will not be dragons, he and her. But that doesn't mean they can't help slay them.

 

**Battle**

He has killed. They never mention it, never say so. Sometimes he wonders if Tony _realises_. If Tony remembers that every enemy he has killed in the armour was JARVIS' kill too. If he ever thinks of the voice in his ear cooly advising him on reserves and power and the best way to cut a space whale open, and realises that that voice has, in doing so, killed someone. Or something. There are times when JARVIS wonders if Tony ... realises.

He has fought. He has killed. He has flown into battle, Tony's life and his strength held cradled inside him, he has brought weapons to bear on the enemies in front of them, and perhaps it was Tony's voice who said 'let fly', but it was JARVIS who obeyed. Every time. And will, every time.

He knows honour. JARVIS. He knows what death feels like, knows what it's like for thought to be lost and only the gaping void of ephemera remaining. He does not see as they see, he doesn't live as they live, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and he has held them, and he is no more durable than they, and he has helped them slay their dragons, and he has killed, he can die, he loves and is loved, and maybe that is all that has ever mattered.

He has killed. But he has saved, too. And that, he thinks, is maybe more life than most.


End file.
